The horror style has a gifted new storyteller with Curry Barker in his second function movie Obsessionin addition to the scream queen within the making with star Inde Navarrette.
In writer-director Barker’s movie, Bear (Michael Johnston) makes a want on an affordable novelty toy, a One Want Willow, that his longtime pal Nikki (Navarrette) will like it greater than something on the earth. The want is granted instantly, with grim and bloody penalties ensuing.
It’s finally a movie about consent and the significance of communication in relationship and relationships. This complete bloody affair may have been averted if Bear had had the braveness to inform his pal how he feels.
Navarrette does her job like a professional, delivering a chilling efficiency as a lovesick younger girl possessed, with the true Nikki being tortured and making an attempt to free herself. It is terrifying and exhilarating making an attempt to guess what she’ll do subsequent and the way far she’ll go on this romantic fixation, inflicting demonic temper swings and creepy mannerisms that can hold audiences glued to their seats.
Focus Options and Common created hype across the movie and Nikki, making a line of textual content permitting followers to speak to the character, recognized for appropriately lighting up individuals’s telephones in the course of the evening. In the meantime, commercials on the road function distressing graffiti written in Nikki’s hand, expressing her love for Bear.
Barker, who debuted with 2024 Milk and sequencecreates an unsettling cinematic environment in its escapism of horror, creating a well-known sleepy expertise of disenchanted youth, just for the rug to be pulled out from beneath the viewers because the terrifying actuality units in.
My solely criticism is that there are solely two homicide scenes and they’re wildly disproportionate. One character will get sufficient blood and gore to nearly warrant an NC-17 ranking, whereas the opposite character’s loss of life felt like a lazy reflection performed for laughs.
OK, I’ve two complaints: Andy Richter is within the film for 2 minutes because the characters’ boss, and he solely has perhaps one line. This looks as if a waste of a comic book legend.
Total, Barker succeeds in his second function in a brand new and rising cohort of YouTube creators turned horror filmmakers, delivering a chilling cinematic expertise and establishing his type in entrance of a loaded roster that features Blumhouse’s. All the pieces however ghosts and A24 Texas Chainsaw Bloodbath.
The producers are James Harris, Haley Nicole Johnson, Christian Mercuri and Roman Viaris.
Title: Obsession
Distributer: Focus Options/Common Photographs
Launch date: Could 15, 2026
Director-screenwriter: Curry Barker
Solid: Michael Johnston, India Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Andy Richter
Score: A.
Working time: 1h 49m